How AI is actually changing day-to-day work

## Summary
Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky Illustration: Jon Han/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky Illustration: Jon Han/The Guardian How AI is actually changing day-to-day work University professors and Amazon workers are wrestling with profound shifts Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Most professors described the experience of contending with the technology in despairing terms. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one said. “Generative AI is the bane of my existence,” another wrote in an email. “I wish I could push ChatGPT (and Claude, Microsoft Copilot, etc) off a cliff.” Read more: ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI View image in fullscreen Illustration: Félix Decombat/The Guardian Varsha Bansal reports on the struggles of Amazon’s technical employees : More than half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. View image in fullscreen Illustration: Anais Mims / Guardian Design/Getty The datacentre investment boom is one of the biggest infrastructure gambles of this era, and Britain may be uniquely exposed. On the big screen Apple iPad Air M4 review: still the premium tablet to beat Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: its huge screen blocks shoulder surfers from spying on you The wider TechScape New study raises concerns about AI chatbots fueling delusional thinking This CEO warns that Democratic voters are most at risk from automation | Arwa Mahdawi Meta reportedly plans sweeping layoffs as AI costs increase Google scraps AI search feature that crowdsourced amateur medical advice Explore more on these topics AI (artificial intelligence) TechScape newsletter Amazon newsletters Share Reuse this content

## Article Content
Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky
Illustration: Jon Han/The Guardian
View image in fullscreen
Group of figures inside a glowing digital space, facing a large window that shows a landscape with trees and sky
Illustration: Jon Han/The Guardian
How AI is actually changing day-to-day work
University professors and Amazon workers are wrestling with profound shifts
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, chuffed about One Battle After Another’s big win at the Oscars. This week, we’re examining how artificial intelligence is changing the everyday reality of white-collar work in the US, the roots of the current appetite for AI in war, and the United Kingdom’s phantom datacenters.
Professors and coders alike wrestle with AI
As part of the Guardian’s
Reworked
series on AI’s effect on modern work, we published two stories this week on how specific jobs are changing: those of university professors and Amazon’s technical employees. Both groups are wrestling with profound shifts.
Humanities professors find their students able to outsource tasks like writing that are meant to develop critical thinking, which leaves those same students with little learning from the completion of their assignments. Some
Amazon
corporate employees say that they face an opposite problem: They hear from their managers that AI can speed up all their tasks, but they find the tools of automating their work slow it down, impeding their work rather than improving it. They find themselves evaluated on the frequency with which they use AI tools that perform their tasks worse than they would unassisted, a confusing conundrum. In a statement, Amazon disputed the characterization that AI encumbered its workers rather than enabling them.
When Silicon Valley entrepreneurs talk about AI altering everything about work, they may be right, but there is often a utopian tone to their predictions that glosses over the discomfort of rapid change. Disruption is a mess in its particulars, which both of these stories demonstrate.
Alice Speri reports on
humanities’ professors angst
:
In fields most explicitly associated with the production of critical thought – what is collectively referred to as the “humanities” – most scholars see AI as a unique threat. With the potential for AI to increasingly substitute independent thought, a pressing question becomes even more urgent: what exactly is a university education for?
The Guardian spoke with more than a dozen professors – almost all of them in the humanities or adjacent fields – about how they are adapting at a time of dizzying technological advancement with few standards and little guidance.
By and large, they expressed the view that reliance on artificial intelligence is fundamentally antithetical to the development of human intelligence they are tasked with guiding. They described desperately trying to prevent students from turning to AI as a replacement for thought, at a time when the technology is threatening to upend not only their education, but everything from the stock market to social relations to war.
Most professors described the experience of contending with the technology in despairing terms. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one said. “Generative AI is the bane of my existence,” another wrote in an email. “I wish I could push ChatGPT (and Claude, Microsoft Copilot, etc) off a cliff.”
Read more:
‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI
View image in fullscreen
Illustration: Félix Decombat/The Guardian
Varsha Bansal reports on
the struggles of Amazon’s technical employees
:
More than half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing.
When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks.
The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”.
“I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.

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## Expert Analysis

### Merits
- Tech’s big flex: billionaire dollars in US politics California billionaires up political action with multimillion-dollar donations Trump administration reportedly set to be paid $10bn for brokering TikTok deal With $200m to spend on the midterms, crypto hopes to repeat its 2024 success: ‘It’s the most critical time’ Tech in the global south ‘Invasive’ AI-led mass surveillance in Africa violating freedoms, warn experts Nigeria’s online content creator market has boomed.

### Areas for Consideration
- Some Amazon corporate employees say that they face an opposite problem: They hear from their managers that AI can speed up all their tasks, but they find the tools of automating their work slow it down, impeding their work rather than improving it.
- Alice Speri reports on humanities’ professors angst : In fields most explicitly associated with the production of critical thought – what is collectively referred to as the “humanities” – most scholars see AI as a unique threat.
- The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says.

### Implications
- When Silicon Valley entrepreneurs talk about AI altering everything about work, they may be right, but there is often a utopian tone to their predictions that glosses over the discomfort of rapid change.
- Most professors described the experience of contending with the technology in despairing terms. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one said. “Generative AI is the bane of my existence,” another wrote in an email. “I wish I could push ChatGPT (and Claude, Microsoft Copilot, etc) off a cliff.” Read more: ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI View image in fullscreen Illustration: Félix Decombat/The Guardian Varsha Bansal reports on the struggles of Amazon’s technical employees : More than half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity.
- She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”. “I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.” Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off.
- Read more: Will AI take Australian jobs, or is it just an excuse for corporate restructure?

### Expert Commentary
This article covers guardian, amazon, war topics. Notable strengths include discussion of guardian. Areas of concern are also raised. Readability: Flesch-Kincaid grade 0.0. Word count: 1821.